History of Athens Part III

The Crusaders of the 13th century controlled Athens up until 1459, which is when the Turks occupied Athens and annexed the city to the Ottoman Empire. The Turks stayed for 400 years and left their mark with monuments such as the Tzisdaraksi Mosqu on the Monastiraki Sq. and near the Roman Agora there is the Fethiye Mosque.

In 1834 the capital of Greece was proclaimed at Athens, where Prince Otto of Bavaria who was the King of Greece at the time, commissioned his architects to build the former Royal Palace (now the parliament buildings), the university and the Academy.

Athens organised the first modern olympics at the imposing Panathenaic Stadium in 1896. The second Olympics held in Athens was this year in 2004, where it was an outstanding success.

In the 20th century, the population of Athens exploded from 200,000 to about 4 million. This makes Athens a fascinating and one of Europe’s largest cities. It has a lot of infrastructural and environmental problems due to its large size. One of the main reasons for Athens explosive population figures was because of the arrival of thousands of ethnic Greeks fleeing Turkey, and later during the 50s and 60s, the provinces were impoverished and this lead to millions of Greek immigrants relocating to Athens.

In 1941 Hitler took over Greece and this lead to death of hundreds of thousands of Greeks, and after the war, Greece had a civil war, which claimed more lives and ended in 1949. Democracy returned to Greece in 1974 and they joined the European Community in 1981.

Throughout the centuries the Acropolis has remained to look out over its citizens in good and bad times. The Parthenon was built as the Temple of the Goddess Athena, but was later transformed by the Byzantine emperors into an Orthodox church and later the Crusaders arrived and changed it into a Catholic church and the Turks created their own Muslim mosque within it. It has being bombed by the Venetians and plundered by the Lord Elgin, who removed splendid decoration from it and sold it to the British Museum in London. The pollution of the air in Athens is now having a corrosive effect and major restoration and preservation is at present taking place.

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